Psychopolitics #2: The Dictatorship of Capital

Byung Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Ch. 1 Sec. 2:  The Dictatorship of Capital

Isolation and Loneliness: Freedom without community

Han writes often on the topic of loneliness, of the contemporary “expulsion of the other.” By this he means not only immigrants, foreigners and those different by race and religion, but all others.Han says that neoliberal capitalism tends towards hyper-individualism and isolation, and substitutes consumable “others” for real friendship. Han:

“As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. . . (p. 2) [emphasis Han]

Fundamentally, freedom signifies a relationship. A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship—when being with others brings happiness. But today’s neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation; as such it does not really free us at all. . . (p. 3) [emphasis Han]

Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty—emotion, play and communication—comes to be exploited.” (p. 3)

While we are making consumable ‘friends’ on facebook, the Meta company is selling our ‘friendship’ to advertisers, who in turn, advertise to us what they want us to want. “Capital generates needs of its own; mistakenly, we perceive these needs as if they belong to us.” (p. 7). Capital exploits our ‘freedom’ to make friends, intimate relationships and families and turns these relationships into profit. As entrepreneurs of the self, we are eager to show that we have lots of these digital ‘friends’, served up for their exploitation. 

‘Freeing’ us from any obligation to another, Capital is then able to exploit us more efficiently, without any resistance. Thus profits are maximized. (Han, p. 3)

The Dictatorship of Capital

Han’s neo-marxist argument begins with an iteration of Marx’s theory, that there is a perennial conflict between the “Forces of Production”, which are Labour, Natural Resources and Technology, and the “Relations of Production”, which are executives, stockholders, financiers, etc.— those who own, dominate and control the forces of Production. Let’s call them Forces of Control. Marx’s thesis is that the Forces of Production are constantly evolving and thus coming into conflict with the Forces of Control. According to Marx, this conflict can only be resolved with a workers’ revolution, a ‘proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie, resulting in a communist social order.’ (Han p. 4)

Han’s argument is that the Forces of Production have evolved from the industrial era into a new and immaterial form of production:

“Accordingly, industrial capitalism has now mutated into neoliberalism and financial capitalism, where are implementing a post-industrial, immaterial mode of production—instead of turning into capitalism. As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. . . Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself. (p. 5) [emphasis Han].

Han argues that this auto-exploitation is self-initiated and voluntary. The neoliberal form of production isolates the ‘entrepreneur of the self’, separating them from the “other”. Because of this solitary form of production: 

“As such it is a mistake to believe that the cooperative “Multitude” will overthrow the parasitic “Empire” and bring forth a communist social order.” (Han, p. 5, after Antonio Negri). 

Since everyone owns the “means of production”, which is the self, then everyone becomes their own producer/owner, and we might add, financier. It is the isolated individual who takes on debt for their own productivity, in the form of college loans, small business loans, artist materials, an automobile for an Uber car service, a computer and smart phone for ‘work at home’ productivity. All of these “means of self-production” are costly and put the self-entrepreneur into life-long debt. This debt is the final form of control that neoliberal capitalism exerts over the self-entrepreneur. It is by this burden of debt that Capital asserts itself as the ‘transcendent master’ of the debt-[and anxiety]-ridden individual. (Han pp. 7-8)

But here’s where I start to have trouble with Han’s analysis:

“In fact, no proletariat exists under the neoliberal regime at all. There is no working class being exploited by those who own the means of production. When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself.” (pp. 5,6)

Uh, excuse me? No working class? What rabbit hole are you living in? Millions of factory workers in China and Southeast Asia, farmers in India, miners in Africa (to name but a few examples) are most certainly in the industrial sector and are most certainly the “proletariat.” 

Do you mean Western Europe and North America perhaps, where neoliberal capitalism is most developed? “Information industry” workers, including software coders, film industry writers and actors have undertaken massive strikes for higher wages, and protection of their jobs and work products from AI scavenging. It turns out these once privileged information industry “creatives” are just another sector the working class. The recent massive layoffs (2022-23) of software engineers in Silicon Valley proved that they don’t “own” their jobs, i.e. the means of production; they don’t even own the intellectual properties they produce.  

Perhaps Han is referring to the academic sector, where he has worked most of his adult life. Students and academics mostly closely fit the description of “auto-exploiting self-entrepreneurs”. Yet there is ongoing labor organizing among part-time, adjunct professors in the academic sector. Students are just the working class without jobs, or part-time workers. The majority of academics are now members of the “precariat”, the new incarnation of the “proletariat.” Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to signify that the proletariat has mutated into a new form, the working class who are subjected to precarious work with no hour, wage or benefit guarantees, and no guarantee of continued work in the next semester or the next day.

Service workers in North America, from Starbucks to Amazon to Uber, have organized labour unions and strikes for better wages and working conditions. Platform workers were among the first to be recognized as the “precariat”. Contractors for Uber, Task Rabbit, Door Dash and other digital platforms were considered “self-employed entrepreneurs” until European and American courts started calling them what they really are: workers, entitled to worker’s rights like wage and hour regulations.

So what does that leave us? Is there anyone else out there who is nothing other than a ‘self-exploiting’ neoliberal? Perhaps the most fitting examples of the neoliberal self-exploiters are people who “labour” in their off-hours on social media, who compose blog posts and comments, post instagram photos and tick-tock videos. Or those, who, like myself, upload original music compositions to BandCamp, videos to YouTube, podcasts to iTunes, hoping to at least be recognized as an artist, even if no one actually buys my music. I am the prototypical “self-exploiter” who voluntarily works for nothing. Han, himself, is perhaps another example: the author who writes and sells books for a living. 

Another group of “self-exploiters” are Buddhist teachers and gurus, some of whom make next to nothing in income, some who are wildly successful and rich. 

To get back on track with Han, let’s examine another statement: “Today, the distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie no longe holds either.” (p. 6). This is a statement that I can at least partly agree with, because the precariat who drives a car for Uber today could tomorrow spend the day as a lone poster on a Reddit forum. Thus, while there remains a ‘working class’, there is no meaningful distinction between ‘contracted’ or ‘self-exploited’ labor under neoliberal capitalism. Whether one has a paid job or not, we are all ‘laboring’ in the regime of neoliberal capitalism.

Han continues: 

But now the illusion prevails that every person — as a project free to fashion him- or herself at will—is capable of unlimited self-production. This means that a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is structurally impossible. Today, the Dictatorship of Capital rules over everyone. (p.6)

In the world of digital production, subjects of the information precariat are simultaneously the consumer, the ‘natural resource’, the laborer, the manager, the financier and the ‘means of production.’ All of these “forces and relations of production” have collapsed into one subject: the neoliberal capitalist. 

Han argues that the defining characteristic of the neoliberal “project” is the sense that one undertakes this productive role voluntarily, and the failure to successfully exploit one’s own labor for the production of the project, i.e. the ‘self’, will subject one to unbearably painful feelings of failure and shame. 

Han continues:

“People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system. Herein lies the particular intelligence defining the neoliberal regime: no resistance to the system can emerge in the first place.” (p. 6)

In other words, there is no “them” (master, bourgeoisie) that “us” (workers) can be against. We are rather “against me” as the transgender guitarist, Laura Jane Grace, named her punk rock band. 

Han continues: 

“Such classless self-exploitation — which was utterly unknown to Marx—renders impossible any social revolution based on the difference between the exploiters, on the one had, and the exploited on the other.” (p. 6)

In one sense this is true, that even those who organize labor and go on strike, or file lawsuits and legislation for workers’ rights, are still not overturning the neoliberal capitalist regime and replacing it with a better system. It is a reformation, not a revolution. They are simply (and necessarily) making life under the current system more bearable, if not even remotely fair. 

John Holloway: Refusal and Other Doing

Can we imagine another system after Neoliberal Capitalism? As Mark Fisher often said, quoting Frederic Jameson, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Capitalism.” This was the crux of Mark Fisher’s thesis, “capitalist realism.” The neoliberal capitalist system forecloses even the possibility of imagining another way of life.

That’s because the end of capitalism would amount to “the end of the world as we know it.” (Michael Stipe, R.E.M.) It would necessitate the collapse of the entire system that we have come to depend on, psychologically and materially. And as subjects of this regime, our very identities and existential sense of being are now enmeshed in neoliberalism.

Yet we persist in believing that ‘another world is possible.’ For this I turn to John Holloway’s “politics of dignity,” his formulation of autonomist community as resistance to capitalism, a ‘refusal and other doing’ than neoliberalism.

Ordinary Rebellions: A Buddhist Reading of John Holloway’s Politics of Dignity 

The interest of ordinary practitioners in social action, so-called “engaged Buddhism”, is growing among both eastern and western practitioners, in both traditional and contemporary lineages. But many Buddhist practitioners seem unable to make both a doctrinal and heartfelt connection between personal practice and social action. This paper explores the resonances between Buddhist dharma and practice and John Holloway’s “politics of dignity,” found in his recent works, How to Change the World Without Taking Power (2003) and Crack Capitalism (2010). In this paper, social action is explored as a resistance to the logics of the Capitalist regime, a “refusal and other doing” that is a manifestation of our human dignity, or “anti-power.” The “fetishism” of material consumption is rejected, and the connection of power as “the power to do”, is restored as the relationship between human beings that brings about “cracks in capitalism” or transformative social change. Merely “sitting in meditation” is re-invented as a transformative act of resistance to the Capitalist logic to produce, to perform, to sell one’s labour and one’s self. Holloway’s model of “autonomism”, as self-organized communities that create social relations outside the logic of capitalism, becomes a blueprint for Buddhist sangha as revolutionary community. Likewise, Holloway’s political comrade, Marina Sitrin and her study of “horizontalism” in protest movements in Latin America, fleshes out the many forms of resistance and “other doings” that emerge from transformative social movements. 

I have been working within and studying social movements for over 30 years, as a community organizer and as a sociologist who studies social movements. Like so many, I have felt the frustration of seeing both reformist and revolutionary movements fail, seemingly, against the power of the Capitalist machine that is running our civilization and destroying our planet. I have an explicit purpose for undertaking this reflection on Holloway’s work. I want to show those of us who engage in Buddhist meditation and other contemplative practices, that we, through our ordinary daily acts of “refusal and other doings”, are etching cracks in this wall of domination. I want to radicalize our practice down the very roots of not just what we do, but why we do it. The very intention with which we undertake Buddhist practice can be redefined as a “refusal and other doing.” I want to inscribe on the minds of Buddhist practitioners that in the daily act of meditation, gathering in community, sharing with and caring for those near and distant from us, we engage in acts of ordinary rebellion. These refusals and other doings feel like flimsy steel spoons that scrape at the concrete wall of Capitalism, yet with persistence they create another crack. We find openings in the regime, we find cracks, as Holloway says, in the seemingly solid concrete wall of domination, cracks that we can see through, cracks that tell us that this wall is not so solid. 

 Refusal and Other Being

The very first thing we can do is to stop exploiting ourselves, and each other, and create communities where “doing nothing” productive is encouraged, not even trying to achieve mediation or ‘enlightenment’. Where friendships without purpose, friendship for the sake of friendship, supporting and being together, just ‘hanging out’, is enough. This is a ‘refusal and other doing’ that could be the starting point of resistance to neoliberal exploitation.